Positive and Negative Symptoms

IS IT BAD for my cactus to live by the window?

I wanted him to get early morning dew ~ the condensation from the window. But won't this give the poor swine frostbite? The poor thing is recovering slowly from his spikey false flower wounds.

He has scabbing around the dots at the top of his trunks where the "floral toothpicks" skewered cruelly in. I have the tiny trotterdonkey fake flowers on my Boogie Nights DVD. The staves are covered in dried dark green cactus-scabbing-juice where hte evil florists pricked them nastily in. I have named the Cactus Kenny.

As we speak, Kenny is still on Donkey Ward in the Cactus Hospital. When he gets better he will be transferred to Horse prior to discharge. If he gets worse and the withered top banana spreads to other bananas causing a Withering Disease, he will get emergency therapy on Ass Ward. When he does make a full recovery he's still due to come in for outpatients appointments at Clopper House, our state of the art Cactus and Succulent Aftercare Building.

Because I am a schizoaffective schizophrenic I have a follow-up appointment on Thursday to be queried and probed to see how mad I am. Dr McGuinness, the Psychiatrist who tells me not to drink (wah wah!) has passed me along to a home help team thing where I get tested to see how schizo I am. Plus how affective.

My affect has actually gone to normal. I know they probably all think I'm hypomanic when in fact I'm NORMAL but that's the thing about psychiatry ~ there is no "normal". I'm secretly hoping to go a bit hypomanic because an "attack" of hypomania feels "like free coke" ~ of the sparkly variety (sparkly and white not sparkling and black!!) Did you iknow btw, that individuals in the 3rd world think Coca Cola's ickky because it's fizzy and BLACK as you'd think no "natural" drink would be... This is actually counterintuitive as Coke's formulation has barely changed in over 100 years and its ingredients are indeed 100% natural!

Anyway I'm quite OK today and very glad of it.

The mood has gone UP to normal.

I perused some fascinating books earlier in the public library, including one by a woman who was a GP who got so depressed she actually had to go for psychosurgery, which is the modern-day counterpart (involving a tiny tiny degree of actual surgery, compared to the old technique, which basically involved shearing the brain in half) ~~ to lobotomy.

I once saw a TV documentary on modern-day psychosurgery which is only performed on sufferers of treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Which fascainted me, because after I got depressed in childhood, the symptoms faded into OCD.

Two bipolar sufferers who had been stuck in depression for over a decade apiece ~ and a lady who couldn't stop counting backwards, she had OCD so badly... all three had precisely the same brain operation. And in all three cases precisely the same area of brain tissue was lasered.

They had this operation and every one of them got better. One of the bipolars had to come back for more, but he was fine afterwards and back doing his art. Brain operations for depression. How amazing is that!

*******

4pm and I've just finished a sinkfull of clothes washing. I am fully into keeping clothes clean myself.

Deshane, my care coordination type person says I have low self-care. That's why he wants me moving into a mental health house.

It makes me feel weird knowing people ~ Professionals ~ sit about talking about me as having mental health problems. What I had called Plain Old Laziness is what Naomi, the Dual Diagnosis Drugs and Mental Health Lady calls "negative symptoms".

Negative Symptoms are what you do get in schizoaffective and don't get in bipolar (despite the name).

Negative Symptoms means you keep yourself to yourself, avoiding others; it means you feel flat, even when not clinically depressed; and that you just cannot get yourself together. Naomi says it's this that keeps me "ill" even when I feel relatively fine. And no medication can treat it. The positive symptoms of Hearing Voices, rapid mood swings and paranoia have mostly gone. I did get some really weird abstract thoughts in my head in a bush this morning (where I was going for a wee). Most of the Positive Symptoms have been banished by risperidone, but the Negative ones remain...

... So that's what I'm fighting against. Even when not depressed I have these things that are symptoms but they don't "feel" like them. They are called Negative or Deficit Symptoms because they mean something isn't there that should be there, as opposed to a Positive Symptom like a delusion or a hallucination, which is something that is there that "shouldn't be". So I'm fighting against this feeling of apathy which is a part of this illness. I don't know whether I'll actually beat it, but I'm trying.

Well I have to go now. I jotted most of this in my notebook earlier, so I hope my half hour is long enough to clatter it into the "system".

Kenny the Cactus passes on his finest regards to you all ...

(Can anybody tell me what species of Banana Cactus he might be ..?)

SEE YERS ALL LATER! :-)